Many of our clients are buying laptops so they can use it at work as a work machine and then take them anywhere hook into the cloud POS software and keep working.
The problem is whoever was responsible for designing the laptop cooling system was an idiot. What happens is that most high powered laptops today, is they are generating a lot of heat often in a short time. This heat can cause permanent damage to the laptop, if you do not do anything about it and can result in an expensive laptop being ruined.
To protect your laptop, many people get cooling mats if they cannot get away with just making sure that the vents are clear by raising the laptop by putting something underneath it and getting some air to run under it often works well. In some laptops leaving the DVD player open can help.
Here are some points that I have found about cooling mats:
-Good cooling mats, often have as well as adjustable settings that allow you to position the laptop and screen that can alleviate wrist pain and put the display in a position where it is easier to read.
-Although most cooling mats work by pumping air on too the computer, this actually works against the laptop fan, I prefer the ones that suck the air out.
-I do not know who thought adding a light was a good idea for a mat because I find that it is annoying, so what I do is take the mat apart and remove the lights.
- They never seem to last very long. Eighteen months is the best I ever got before I have to get a new one even though I get solid ones made of metal. I would not look at plastic ones.
-Check the noise level of the fan, it is going to be right up close to you for many hours a day and you really do not want it to be too loud. If you get a cooling mat that is too powerful all you are going to do is get more noise, then you need unnecessarily. This is why some cooling mats work well we some laptops and not good with other.
-Vibration can be very unpleasant too. A client bought a cooling mat, a few months ago and gave it back within days because the vibrations were just too much. Besides being unpleasant for the user, I doubt it was good for the laptop that it was vibrating.
-Make sure the fan is blowing air where the laptop is getting hot. No point blowing air to places where it is not hot.
-Need to make sure the laptop fits, if its too big the laptop tends to slip out. I used to use a band to hold the laptop in position.
-A critical problem is what position you will be when using the laptop? If you are like me, the laptop is next to my bed at night, and I tend to use my laptop lying in bed so a mat is excellent as it keeps the air vents free, as without it the doona would cover the vents and cause the laptop to overheat.
-Make sure on specs it has a minimum of 30 CFM. Now test with your hand that the amount of air getting on the laptop is reasonable. Too many of the cooling mats are useless because they do not pump enough air.
To test its working, I tend to find that merely putting my hand over the hot spot is enough but if you want something better, I suggest this software *Core Temp* which I find fast, accurate, and flexible.
What you want to do is see that the red arrow is within the acceptable limits of where the green line is pointing.
